How Will The MacBook Air Change The MacBook Pro?

parislemon:

Agree with much of this. The new MacBook Air is the MacBook Pro’s worst enemy. When I got the new 13” MBA, I stopped using my 15” MBP completely. And it was a top-of-the-line i7 decked out with RAM and an SSD. In fact, I just sold it.

Apple will need to fundamentally alter the MBP line.

I would imagine the standard MacBook or the 13” MBP will be killed off. Maybe even both.

The 17” MBP, like Marco points out, is for a certain type of buyer, so they may not change it much. But the 15” is the real sweet-spot.

I’m all in favor of ditching the optical drive and making the entire thing thinner (though I’m really not sure they will with the Pro in this iteration). Meanwhile, the remaining extra space should be all about battery. Imagine if Apple sold a laptop promising something like 12-15 hours of battery life? Huge.

And yes, the glass screen should go too. It’s too heavy and too reflective.

So maybe we’d have a 15” MBP weighing in around 4 pounds. With 12 hours of battery life. Intel’s latest processors and 4 GB of RAM standard (expandable to 8 GB). More ports than the MBA. All starting around $1,600.

That would tempt me to switch back to a Pro. Though I still don’t think I would. The Air is that good.

A friend said ‘the Macbook Air is going to be the best laptop ever, like the Audi S8 is the best internal combustion automobile ever made.’ His point was that the next generation of car will be electric, and the esthetics and experience will completely change how we evaluate cars. The rise of tablets will shift our thinking about personal computing, totally, as well. But the new Macbook Air is incomparably better than what immediately came before.

I love my 11” Macbook Air, and I gave my old 13” Macbook Pro to my son Keenan, as he went back to college after Xmas, and I had not a single twinge of regret. The new Air is that good.

I am sure that Apple will airify all the macbooks, and really soon.